It’s What’s Inside That Counts

Of course, first and foremost here at lifehack.org are the half-dozen or so new posts that go up nearly every morning. Go ahead and subscribe to our RSS feed, if you haven’t already. Our posts are organized into six categories: Communication, Lifestyle, Management, Money, Productivity, and Technology. lifehack.org is written by several permanent writers, including our founder Leon Ho, Craig Childs, Scott H. Young, and myself (Dustin M. Wax). In addition, a never-ending stream of guest authors post here, bringing to bear their wisdom and perspectives from a range of professional and personal perspectives. Guest posts are identified in the bio following their articles — be sure to check out their websites for more. And, of course, there’s you: our readers, commenters, and inspiration. Got a topic you’d like to see lifehack.org cover? Email our tips hotline at tips@lifehack.org. Or become a guest contributor yourself — see our contributor’s guidelines for more information. You’ll be writing for one of the most popular blogs on the Internet: no. 41 according to Technorati. There’s worse ways of getting your message out!

But Wait, There’s More!

While the blog is the visible face of lifehack.org, it’s only part of what we do here. lifehack.org is about people helping other people to lead happier, more productive lives, and none of our writer have a monopoly on how to do that. At its heart, lifehack.org is not about the one-way flow of ideas and advice — it’s about the community of like-minded folks lending each other their own wisdom, advice, and the little hacks that make life a bit easier. In short, we encourage ever reader to take part, to share your own tricks and knowledge with the rest of us. One way to do that, of course, is to comment on our stories. We thrive on your feedback, of course, but that’s only one way among several for your voices to be heard here. There’s also our howto section, an instruction manual for life. Built around the same software that powers WikiPedia, the lifehack.org How-To Manual has pages on writing, sleep habits, management skills, and other topics gleaned from lifehack.org, but it could and should be home to much more — any information you feel will help someone get a grasp on his or her life is welcome. Register for an account and start sharing! Or maybe you prefer something a bit more conversational? Then pay the lifehack.org community forum a visit and join the conversation. Any topic covered at lifehack.org is fair game, from your thoughts on a recent post to your grand philosophy of productivity to an inside look at your Moleskine.

But That’s not All!

You don’t have to be at your computer to enjoy all the lifehacky goodness lifehack.org offers. Load up your iPod or other music player with the lifehack.org podcast (Subscribe). Currently hosted by lifehack.org contributor, entrepreneur, and cartoonist Tony D. Clark, the podcasts are titled “Trial By Fire Productivity”, with each monthly episode finding a different person in the hotseat to answer five questions about how they stay productive: Finally, because no productivity website is complete without its own line of GTD downloads, we offer you as your free gift just for dropping by our templates. Designed to be printed out on sheets of letter- or A4-sized card stock, the GTD templates will look swell tucked into your Hipster PDA or the back pocket of your Moleskine. Also pretty cool is the graph paper generator: Enter your paper size and the size of grid lines you want and voila! A pdf file you can download and print out over and over and over. If you find your schedule getting a little too demanding for graph paper and index cards, you may want to try out Tony Clark’s Task Flow Worksheet and Risks Versus Rewards Worksheet on the same page. Tony’s written up full instructions for each of them, so enjoy.

Closing Time

So there you have it — a brief tour of the facilities, capped off with a free template or two to take home and show your friends. Since we’d naturally like to see lifehack.org be the best site it can possibly be, we’d love to see you using all the features outlines above. But maybe you need more, maybe there’s something that would make lifehack.org that much better or you? Let us know, either here or in the forums.

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